The Food Lab: My Favorite Grilling Recipes

It's time for another round of The Food Lab. Got a suggestion for an upcoming topic? Email Kenji here, and he'll do his best to answer your queries in a future post. Become a fan of The Food Lab on Facebook or follow it on Twitter for play-by-plays on future kitchen tests and recipe experiments.

[Photograph: J. Kenji López-Alt]

I'm a creature of the cold. I like my beaches rocky, gray, and overcast, and my mountains snow-covered. I'd take the Pacific Northwest over the Mediterranean any day of the year (except that rare day when it's sunny in Seattle), and if I had my way, summer would last at most a week in New York.

Why would I even want that week at all? If summer has one saving grace, it's that during hot days, I essentially have no choice but to grill. It's not just that the kitchen is too hot to fire up the oven, it's an innate, natural calling. I see the sun glinting off the shiny black dome of my trusty Weber kettle and it sets off a near-Pavlovian reaction in me that causes my legs to take me to the corner store for coal and my arms to start butterflying chickens, with little-to-no actual mental involvement. Am I the only one? I somehow doubt it.

So needless to say, I've done quite a few grilled recipes for The Food Lab over the years. Here are a few of my absolute favorite recipes—the ones that I spent the most time working on, or the ones that simply appear time and again during my summer cookouts.